One thing that I like about the ".txt.vbs" trick is that: Ok, Windows was hiding the file extension, so users where not seeing the ".vbs". But users that were still seeing the ".txt" and thought that was a text file, even though a real text file would have had its extension hidden!

In other words, the "social engineering" trick only worked because users had been previously trained to look at the file extension to identify file type, and then Windows took away the file extensions.

HN is frequently talking about how harmful the impact of UX changes that we push onto users can be. Here's a 20-years-old example!

This was HUGE news at the time, being covered by pretty much every channel and newspaper. My family received just one ILOVEYOU email (to the one email account we had for the entire family that we downloaded to the single computer in the house with dial-up internet) after the news broke, and we were smart enough to delete it without reading. But deep down inside I was kind of proud that the bug made it to the boonies and I was really tempted to open it anyway. I doubt that it would have done anything since we used Juno's software for email and browsing and I don't think it used the Windows Address Book and we didn't have Outlook configured.

I also like the aftermath, in which the Philippines caught the guys who wrote the bug and then realized that they hadn't technically committed a crime under Philippine law, so they just let them go. They wrote some cyber-crime laws afterwards, but I imagine Duterte's government wouldn't have let the guys go.

Edit: I took a walk down memory lane, and holy crap! Juno still exists: https://www.juno.com/ Also, s/bug/worm/g.

YouTuber danooct1[1] made a video demonstrating this worm, he has a lot of videos demonstrating "old school" viruses.

1: https://youtu.be/ZqkFfF5kAvw

>In May 2020, it was revealed that while researching his cybercrime book Crime Dot Com, investigative journalist Geoff White had found Onel de Guzman working at a mobile phone repair stall in Manila. De Guzman admitted creating and releasing the virus. He claimed he had initially developed it to steal Internet access passwords, since he could not afford to pay for access. He said that Michael Buen, who had also fallen under suspicion during the investigation, had nothing to do with the virus' creation.

Fascinating. Is this why you posted this, OP?

Not OP, but it's also the 20 year anniversary

>infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 4 May 2000

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057569

Holy crap, I remember this. I accidentally clicked on it myself then had to send a mass email to everyone on my contact list not to do the same, and I correctly identified it as a "trojan horse" type. One of my friends at work said that they might not have clicked on it if it hadn't been me that the sender had been (I guess that was a compliment?).

The book by the reporter who did the most recent investigation related to the case, that’s mentioned in the Wikipedia Article, is coming out later this year: https://amzn.to/2xAIayp

That was a crazy morning.

Tell us about it! What was it like for you?

Back then I had an old SPARCstation as a second computer with Debian, running INN (a Usenet news server) and Exim (mail server), both fed by UUCP over TCP.

That was long after UUCP was used seriously, but a few hobbyists still used it for fun.

Batches arrived, were decompressed and fed into Exim and INN.

That day (and the following days), batches were not decompressed before the next ones arrived. System load was through the roof.

I had never implemented or even thought about real load handling and queuing, because why should I? My few hundred kilobytes (or maybe a megabyte?) of mails and news every half hour were decompressed pretty much instantly. Until that day.

I was working for a small non-profit focused on youth voting. I was working out of the Americorps/CityYear office in Philly that morning. My dad was the Director of IT for a major University.

It was pretty early in the morning when it hit. And it hit fast. I received I Love You emails, but knew something was up. Called my dad and shit was hitting the fan there and he gave me a heads up what was happening. While I was on the phone with him, the office I was in started having alot of commotion as it started going through their inboxes.

I don't remember there being much actual damage, but it was stunning how fast and widespread it was. It's one of those days you look back on and remember as a day the internet changed.

Ironically enough, the worm was spread by humans. It required deliberate human interaction - execution of the attachment - at each step.

The whole script seemed to stick to the one trick of messing with extensions.

Simple often does the trick.